Athletes and fitness enthusiasts commonly incorporate strength-building routines that use exercise equipment such as weight machines, barbells, dumbbells, bench press bars. Often, the apparatus between the user and the weight or forces used for fitness conditioning is a simple bar.
Traditional exercise bars are made of metal and have smooth portions of its surface that can slip in one's hand easily, and designated rough portions of the surfaces that are designed for increased friction, but are abrasive to a user's skin. The standard Olympic diameter of a workout bar is 2.80 centimeters (1.10 inches). Depending on the user and the particular exercise, considerable amounts of weight can be transmitted to a relatively small area of the palm.
When strength-building routines utilize significant weight and/or high repetitions, the intensity of the exercise creates conditions where the skin of the user's palms are subject to callusing. The process of callusing can be painful enough to reduce one's full capacity for physical training. Additionally, thick skin and the roughness of calloused hands are undesirable in most other areas of a person's functioning life.
Users commonly wear workout/weightlifting gloves to help evenly distribute the compressive forces over the anatomy of the hand and to avoid slipping and callusing problems. Workout gloves are somewhat cumbersome to put on and take off, even properly fitting ones. Workout gloves cover a significant portion of the hand and when gloves are worn continually, excessive body heat and sweating are common problems. Because gloves wrap around the base of all fingers and thumbs, and wrap around the hand, bunching material usually causes uncomfortable constrictions and uneven areas of pressure.
Calluses built from these strength-building routines most commonly form on a narrow region of the hand predominantly comprising the strip of palm just below the fingers, and on the first pads of the fingers closest to the palm.